Predictive validity of a national examination for medical graduates in the People's Republic of China

National examinations for medical graduates were introduced on an experimental basis in the People's Republic of China in 1982. To estimate the predictive validity of the National Medical Examination (NME), an investigation of the postgraduate competence of a sample of the participating examinees was conducted in 1984. The sample consisted of 1,717 of the 4,995 graduates from 13 medical colleges who had taken the initial NME. Their scores on the NME and the ratings given them by directors of postgraduate programs in nine aspects of clinical competence were compared by frequency distribution and product-moment correlation coefficients. Scores on the NME were consistent with measures of postgraduate clinical competence and, as a whole, correlated significantly with the ratings of clinical competence, supporting the use of the score on the NME as a predictor of postgraduate clinical competence. However, the extent of the relationship between the NME score and postgraduate clinical competence varied according to the specialty program of postgraduate medical training.